Judging by what I hear from old friends or just by a quick look at the British media, these are not easy times to be a Conservative in Blighty. Indeed, they haven’t been for a long time. The Conservative Party (and its supporters) have traditionally been a broad church, but just about every section of the congregation has been left unhappy or angry by years of bungling and the parliamentary party’s descent into Merkelism.
Under the circumstances, the appeal of Nigel Farage’s Reform is easy enough to understand, even if the party’s surge seems to have been held back by his comments on Ukraine, which were, on a kind interpretation, careless. For an experienced politician to be put in a position where he has to parse or explain wording that could be read as leaning too far in Putin’s direction was, regardless of anything else, a political mistake. Thankfully, British support for Ukraine remains solid. Indeed, a recent poll showed that 80 percent would support Ukrainian membership of NATO. That’s not going to happen, but it’s a revealing gauge of popular sentiment.
A quick look at the latest YouGov poll shows Labour on 37 percent, the Conservatives on 20 percent, and Reform on 17 percent. National percentages can be misleading in a country that combines various different local voting patterns and first-past-the-post. It’s a mistake to think that all those now opting for Reform would default to the Conservatives (quite a few would stay at home or vote Labour) and it’s a mistake to think that those opting for the Conservatives would default to Reform (they too might stay at home or go for the Liberal Democrats), but it ought to be lost to no-one on the right that 20+17 = 37. Thanks to FPTP, Labour looks set to win a vast majority on the back of a split Right, further boosted by canny tactical voting by the Left (the poll shows the Liberal Democrats on 13 percent and the Greens on 7 percent) to get the Tories out.
Quite a few in the Reform camp appear to think that the only answer to Tory drift is to burn the whole thing down in order to achieve a Canadian-style reinvention and rebirth of the Right, but that’s a possible precedent to be regarded with some care. It’s well known that in Canada’s 1993 election the Progressive Conservatives were reduced to two MPs. What’s sometimes forgotten is that Canada’s Reform party won 52 seats (up from one) at the same election, with about 18 percent of the vote. Canada has a FPTP voting system (thus the Progressive Conservative wipeout, despite getting around 16 percent of the vote). Those 52 seats (in a 295-seat House of Commons) gave Reform something to build on. Despite that, it was not until 2006 that a successor Conservative party, incorporating all wings of the Right, was able to form a (minority) government.
The starting point of that long, long road back was Reform’s triumph in 1993, a decent haul of MPs made possible by concentrated support in the Canada’s west. A constituency or two apart, the British Reform does not have that concentrated support. It may win a handful of seats, but that’s a much smaller foundation for the rebuilding of the British Right, let alone on its terms. In 1993 in Canada, Reform had 52 seats to the Progressive Conservatives’ two. The equivalent of those numbers may be reversed in Westminster after this election.
The Tories have earned much of the anger (although, Daniel Hannan is correct when he argues that some of this is overdone) they have aroused on the Right, but that’s still no reason for people on that side of the aisle to vote against their interests and beliefs if not (at this moment) their instincts.
The Spectator’s Fraser Nelson was too close to the Tories’ clumsy and ultimately disastrous “modernizing” project, but he is not wrong when he writes this:
If the polls are right and Starmer ends up with a majority out of all proportion to his support, he will be urged to use this freak moment of power to make the political landscape more favourable to the left, just as the Thatcher revolution promoted home ownership, share ownership and other causes more favourable to the right when the SDP split the left in the 1980s. ‘Why would Starmer sit there and wait for the right to recover?’ asks one Tory minister. ‘He’ll do what we did.’
State regulation of the press could be forced through, stifling commentary that challenges the government. Labour will be able to renew the BBC Charter and appoint a more muscular head of Ofcom. GB News, the television channel where Farage and Rees-Mogg are both presenters, may end up being taken off air. Online-debate rules could be tightened to make it harder to publish against-the-grain views. And who in the Commons would be there to protest such a crackdown?
And the misery wouldn’t end there. To start with, the “race” to net zero (another disastrous legacy of the Conservative years) will be accelerated, the border will remain a shambles, taxes will increase still further, and wokery (bad enough as it is — another Tory failure) will run amok.
Peter Hitchens, who could not have more disparaging about Tory “modernization,” has been warning of the danger posed by disaffected Conservatives throwing away their votes.
And so, also in the Spectator, has Lionel Shriver:
The notion that an historically extraordinary Labour majority would betoken a renewed British enthusiasm for socialism is off the beam. Where is the emotion in this election? What few passions July’s contest stirs fester almost exclusively among fed-up former Tory voters. They’re furious. They’re so angry they can’t see, and so have become blind to their self-interest. Demented by loathing for their own party, they are about to elect, or be complicit in electing, an extreme left-wing government largely to punish the current one for being too left-wing…
Whether by staying home, splitting the right-of-centre vote by opting for Reform or defiantly voting Labour, disgruntled former Tory supporters are obsessed with punishing their own party into oblivion for its wasteful, weak, lazy, lacklustre and anything but genuinely conservative governance. But the politicians will be fine; they’ll have a bit more time for their geraniums. A Labour government will punish the British people. It will be an economic, political, social and democratic disaster, which you poor bastards don’t deserve.
The Right should play the tactical-voting game, too. Conservative loyalists should vote Conservative except in constituencies where Reform, rather than the Tories, has the better realistic chance of winning the seat. In those, they should vote Reform. Those whose sympathies lie with the Conservatives but who are furious with the way in which they have governed should still vote for them in seats they could realistically win, while voting for Reform in the seats Reform has a better realistic chance of winning. They should vote Reform in seats that neither Reform nor the Conservatives has any serious chance of winning in order to run up the former’s share of the popular vote. That would deliver a symbolic signal of their discontent. Reform supporters should vote Reform except in seats where Conservatives have the better realistic chance of winning the seat. In those seats they should vote Conservative.
Such decision-making is not made any easier by the fact that, in an election like this, national polling may be a poor guide to local political reality.
What a mess. My record as a predictor of election results is hopeless could be improved, but I think I am on safe ground in saying that Sunak’s decision to go for a snap poll looks catastrophic. The question, then, for those on the Right is whether they favor damage or damage limitation.
Speaking of foolish snap polls, the first round of voting will be in France tomorrow, but that’s another story.